Hoarding details

Just recently, I discovered the difference between details and concepts. Details help explain a part of a concept through examples, specific execution, mistakes, etc. They are concrete and have practical applications. A concept, in turn, is a set of knowledge describing the phenomenon itself — its root causes and why it continues to exist. Concepts are abstract, harder to understand, and can’t be applied immediately, but they are the ones that truly grant knowledge.

Both are important, they can’t exist without each other. The problem, though, is that due to the way we now consume information, we’ve started focusing on details more than trying to understand concepts.

I was exposed to this to an extreme degree. I like listening to interviews, reading articles, and books, and many ideas from there were ending up in my notes without much digestion. One of the last times I listened to a podcast, that criticized meetings at tech companies and proposed their complete abandonment. The arguments were typical: meetings are tiring, meetings lead to more meetings, meetings are an alternative to real work.

I’ve long sympathized with this view, though never had a concrete explanation for why. Since these arguments felt like an explanation, I wrote something along these lines in my notes: “meetings are evil, companies should avoid them at all costs.”

This happened to me everywhere — studying a technical pattern, brainstorming ideas with a team, diving into new fields. I had a lot of “profound” notes (details), but the moment I tried to apply them practically or explain them to someone else, none of them made sense.

That’s why I decided to change my approach. Now, if I hear that “meetings are evil,” I try to ask only a single question: “why?” From this question, I’ll start an hour-long adventure into cognitive psychology and management. I’ll shallowly (which is fine) explore concepts related to cognitive fatigue, decision-making patterns, and the lack of body language cues, skim through articles about successes and failures in asynchronous teams, and only then draw my own conclusions.

If a detail isn’t worth deep research, there’s a high chance I don’t need to remember it in the first place. I’ll try to forget about it, get it out of my head, and focus on something more important.